If you considered the Indian influences in the Western cultures, you could look at :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalaripayattu
and https://www.amazon.com/Shastra-Vidya-Ancient-Martial-Kshatriyas/
or more broadly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_martial_arts

Yeah, I find the idea of crop deities being local less likely and functional.
(obviously, local gods are a thing and there were historically local fertility deities. But I also quite like crop-specific deities, as such plant personification somehow feels more archaic maybe?
If I were to choose, as I agree there is a bit of a contradiction there, I'd go with crop-specific deities. Or, crop specific global deities with local variations = "Oh, yeah, Pela, totally. We call her Palu here.". Or is that too Godlearnery? )
Basically, should a local area fertility goddess necessarily be a grain goddess? I can imagine her being seen more as a mother/leader/overseer of the smaller crop-specific grain goddesses, or even their local servant if we wanted to flip it and preserve the global crop deities as universally more important.
(edit: It's possible I'm just seeing it as less practical and less neat from a systemic point of view - to have thousands of small local goddesses who are nearly identical, but their <barley/wheat/millet/oat...> vector has slightly different permutation of values. Guess it depends on how much Glorantha needs to be like the real world, which is undeniably messy, and how much it wants to be a game setting. ;))

Right, I caught those references, mostly.
Why I originally asked this - I quite like the idea of Kralorela and would love to do something with it. (what exactly depends somewhat on my future schedule and also what possibilities are left open by the existing material)
But of course, I wouldn't want to go against any established canon.

I have to admit, as an artist I find it rarely helpful. For instance, I will get an art brief and it contains a term I haven't heard before. Or I'm about to illustrate a culture I haven't done before.
I search for it on the wiki and most of the articles are just full of hyperlinks, without any actual descriptions, explanations or information content. Then clicking through deeper and deeper I travel down the branches of the tree and when I get to the end node, there's no or very little info there.
There is some information stored in the structure of the wiki, but that's not easily parsed by human beings.

I drew a rather interesting concave shield as concept art for 6A, which ended up not used (it was on a very distant fringe of what we needed).
It was meant for light manipulation magic. Hopefully I'll be able to show it after the game's released. (even if it doesn't appear anywhere in it :D)

I find that religious iconography is often like anime. (great sentence to be typing in the morning btw :D)
It can be very stylized and characters are often distinguished only by their attributes like accessories or hairstyles and hats.
And often the characters reflect parts of society and their fashion. If you look at 1st or 2nd century buddhist statues from northern India and Afghanistan, you'll see a whole lot of moustached dudes, because that was the noble fashion then. If you see a guy with a full beard who also carries a weird club or a stick, there's a very good chance of him being Vajrapani (Herakles).
When it was time to draw the gods, we definitely looked at how the people worshipping them dress and groom themselves. (I think that'll be clearer once the game is out)

Orlanth in KODP wears a blue cloak:
and the "reenactor" depicting Heler (?) is painted blue:
You can also see that Orlanth here has a beard. If you look at recent depictions (in the sourcebook and 13th Age Glorantha), you can see he's got a moustache.
What's that all about? Well...the artist is Michelle Lockamy who also did art for Six Ages. There just may be some continuity there. (if you watch the trailer that just came out...)

Apologies for butting in, but I don't see a thread about the actual book - Aside from the art, should I buy it if I already have the Guide?
(sorry, I've not followed this much, not sure if there's new material in this)